JENKINS: SolarRain crafts novel ocean story

No consumer product is more reliant on the power of narrative than bottled water.

The treated fluid that comes out of a spigot is practically free, guaranteed potable and ridiculously plentiful.

To spike market value for a commodity that’s worth next to nothing, resourceful companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to make tap water seem yucky and/or risky while touting their designer H2O as healthier and infinitely more appealing to modern sensibilities.

For example, one of my Canadian favorites, Berg Water, claims its prehistoric water is cleaner than any other’s because it’s harvested from icebergs. “The theory,” Berg explains, “is that water frozen into the glaciers of western Greenland 15,000 years ago is free from man-made pollutants.”

Or consider Perrier, the French elixir in the elegant green bottle, which says its water is drawn “naturally sparkling from the center of the earth.” The center of the Earth?

Closer to home, Palomar Mountain has parlayed the mystical allure of altitude into a lasting market position. “Our pure spring water source is high on the mountain above the smog level,” the Escondido company reassures.

On store shelves around the world, it’s water, water everywhere, each bottle telling a seductive story of pristine purity and supernatural vitality.

In this fully hydrated market, 80 percent of which is owned by giants Nestle, Coke and Pepsi, a new narrative is taking shape in Valley Center.

“Our story is way better than anyone else’s story,” declares B.J. Kjaer, a 60-year-old Valley Center organic fruit grower, an entrepreneurial native of Denmark who, after a colorful career in the international bicycle industry, has pooled a small group of investors to create on a small scale what Poseidon Water intends to perform in Carlsbad on an industrial scale: Transform ocean water into drinking water and, in SolarRain’s case, charge a premium for the privilege of drinking sanitized seawater in an enzyme-laced plastic bottle so biodegradable that microbes devour it in a matter of months once it hits a landfill.

While Poseidon’s story is awesome (rain or shine,

50 million gallons a day worth of awesome), its technology is no big deal: Reverse-osmosis is as familiar as internal combustion, but the process sucks up energy and sends a flood of toxic brine back into the ocean.

SolarRain, on the other hand, is a low-tech planetary survival strategy that produces a couple of thousand gallons on a good sunny day.

At a 10,000-square-foot plant in Valley Center, 3,000 solar tubes heat into a vapor the saltwater drawn from beneath the ocean floor, thanks to a cooperative research facility Kjaer declines to identify. (You need a permit to siphon ocean water in quantity, Kjaer says, which is weird considering global warming and rising sea levels. But I digress.)

At SolarRain, the hot vapor cloud is cooled, creating drinkable rain. The healthful minerals in ocean water are retained while the salt is harvested and used by several chefs in San Diego restaurants as well as an olive oil company, Kjaer says.

The fossil-based power needed to create SolarRain is negligible. If it rains, water production slows to a trickle. Even at full tilt, waste is zilch.

Delicious water story, no?

Last week, I went to Jimbo’s in Escondido and bought about a quart of SolarRain for $1.89. Back in the office, I offered a slug to six journalists. They all said it tasted fine but, unlike with wine or beer, there was no talk of legs or bouquet or finish. At first blush, water is water.

Once I tell the story of SolarRain, however, the locally crafted water, fully regulated by the FDA, seems to taste better.

Recently, Kjaer asked a manager at an area Whole Foods how SolarRain’s sales compare with more mature status brands.

In that store for the health-conscious affluent, the “ocean-sourced” water from Valley Center, in production for less than two years, is keeping pace with Evian, an imported mineral water that for a century or two (depending on how you measure the product’s timeline) has epitomized French quality in the eau-so-good-for-you water world.